I’m Fred, one of the artist in OutsideIN Collective and this is the first entry of weekly updates on the developement of Project ‘Shop’.

So this week has been very busy and full of ups and downs, just like most week since we began working on this project full-time in January. Its been a week of designing, printing and rain… with some disappointment!

Making ‘Shop’ Happen!

Martin has been hard at work on the phone and email each day contacting various landlords and local officials continuing our ongoing fight to get hold of an empty shop unit, so we can actually do the event in may! It is as ever an up hill struggle… even though there are many empty units around… we have council support… everyone is very positive about the idea… and even with the offer of money and advertising many leads have gone dead… some just couldn’t commit till April and this is too long for us, because we need to have the space so we know what cardboard shelves to make and more importantly to get posters and flyers made to get people to experience ‘Shop’. It is hard to not let it bring us down… we do what is suggested to us but with each success like getting £250 from the radio there seem to come another closed-door or hurdle.

But we continue to spin many plates of this project in hope. At the moment there are 2 possible shop locations left in Bournemouth and the chance we could do it in Poole, but this week we will push to get a space or start on top-secret plan B. (whatever that will be)

Designing: Many designs are flowing from the groups… ‘Ultra upgrade’ ‘legit-chew’ ‘Placebo’ and many more, and they are all really good and will make engaging talking points… different subjects and themes… but all beautifully design subversion of products with a juicy layer of cultural referencing and humour!

I am really excited to see how people respond to them and what conversation comes, this is my greatest interest and its this that keeps me going!

Printing: As easter break is approaching and we won’t be able to use the studio for a few weeks, so we set the target of printing 250 products this and next week to bring the total number of products for the ‘Shop’ to approximately 1300… that’s quite a big challenge… this week we only managed 100+ products as we wanted to make sure the new designs were as good as they could be and had problem getting silk screen exposed

but NEXT WEEK we will PRINT LIKE MAD to get 300 products printed!

ALSO THIS WEEK

We have been working on product Ad storyboards, talking the film students who are helping us and set the shoot date for next friday… just need to find the actors and get the props made!

We had another fun workshop at Stitch at 60 Million Postcards, its was a good night with great music and lots of cakes… to many cakes and some strange cardboard dressed men!

Ellie continued Fund raising by selling the wonderful Mooshie Taboo T-shirts and bags at STITCH and Cowabunga at The Winchester, we still have many more beautiful designs for you to buy!

Fun at prop workshop!

Thats it for now, check back soon as we will be uploading the BBC radio Solent interview that we bumble our way through. Plus we are currently setting up an OutsideIN youtube channel to get up all funny videos from the Project ‘Shop’ so far and playlists of the research we’ve been laughing at!

fredx

Get involved or find out more: email projectshop@outsideincollective.com

as you all know we are going to Stitch on Wednesday 17th to sell beautiful Mooshie Taboo T-shirts and bags.. and maybe even prints to raise money for Project ‘Shop’ but as well as this we are trying to get people engage in the fun of Project ‘Shop’ buy making there own products…

for this we all need to do some collecting… the basic plan is get cartons and small boxes spray them white and give people a marker pen… as well as this we will have paper nets printed out… its just about the fun of it…. best design of the night gets at Free drink! I’ll pay for the drink but need to use project money for spray paint and pens, that ok?

we can have the product design brief as well for if people really want to get involved need to do a bit of work for this… and the mailing list sheet and photos of Mini ‘Shop’!

so as Ellie, Ellie and Patrick are doing the T-shirt side more I think it should be down to Jack, Martin and I to get the workshop all set up…

I have begun putting my sketches into Illustrator and tracing them to make vector quality designs. So far, they don’t look very good, but i’m working on them. Aiming to have 6 different designs in total, to go onto screens to be printed using the method of silkscreening.

And have a large number of tshirts printed and ready to sell before the 13th of Feb…!